The Ironworkers’ training and apprenticeship programs ensure workers across the nation have the skills they need for 21st century green energy projects. The union and its labor-management component, IMPACT (the Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust), have developed a new program on wind turbine construction and safety that provides workers with the job skills needed for the growing wind energy industry.

Click here to read more about this state-of-the-art training in our special AFL-CIO union innovators series.   

Laura Bliss Morris from the Union Sportsmen's Alliance (USA) sends us this report.

John Sferazo, a retired Ironworkers Local 361 member and longtime member of the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance will be profiled for his extraordinary contributions to conservation in the June 2012 issue of Field & Stream—the world’s leading outdoor magazine.

Since suffering physical and emotional trauma as a Ground Zero volunteer on 9/11, Sferazo has worked to provide free hunting opportunities for first responders and veterans. With the support of 30 organizations, his nonprofit group American Greenlands Restoration Inc. has turned a former 1,000-acre asphalt plant site in Maine back into a thriving forest habitat.

President Obama had a question for the delegates to the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department’s (BCTD) annual legislative conference in Washington, D.C.

What’s a better way to make our economy stronger?  Giving another tax break to every millionaire and billionaire in the country?  Or building the roads and bridges and broadband networks that will help our businesses sell more goods around the world?

Tributes continue to come in for Mark Ayers, president of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), who died unexpectedly April 8 at age 63. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calls Ayers an “extraordinary leader and friend.”

Thanksgiving is a good time to give thanks for union members who engage in good works throughout the year. In Seattle, IronworkersLocal 86 members have been putting smiles on the faces of some very sick children since they began painting young patients’ names and messages on the beams of a new wing at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The Ironworkers today send us this video of their action at the South Capitol Street Bridge in Washington D. C., with the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) during last week’s AFL-CIO’s Infrastructure Investment Day of Action. The actions highlighted dozens of bridges across the nation in desperate need of repair and called on Congress to put millions of Americans back to work rebuilding the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads.

Marie Smith, AFL-CIO Community Services liaison in Omaha, Neb., sends us this report.

When the switch was thrown earlier this month on a 75-foot tall, steel-framed “Tree of Lights” in downtown Omaha, volunteers of Ironworkers Local 21 had their first chance to see their handiwork sparkle.

Jay Hurley, president of the New England Ironworkers District Council, says he wanted to prove a point to those who claim that the recent focus on the deteriorating conditions of the nation’s bridges and infrastructure is overblown.

AFL-CIO Community Services Director Will Fischer sends us this report.

More than 90 children received school supply bags through donations of union members in 10 locals from Saginaw County, Mich. AFL-CIO/Michigan Community Services liaison Steven Lamb reports that earlier this month, the unions gave the school supply bags to the YMCA, First Ward Community Center, Salvation Army and the Neighborhood House to distribute to area school children.

In this op-ed, Charles Wowkanech and Laurel Brennan, president and secretary-treasurer, respectively, of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO describe the state federation’s 50 years of making a difference.

Fifty years ago today, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, symbolically “tied the knot” linking the hands of AFL leader Vincent Murphy and CIO chief Joel Jacobson.